John Brownlee - page 5

One of my favorite things about iOS 9 is picture in picture mode, which keeps a small window of a movie visible on screen at all times. Unfortunately, OS X El Capitan doesn’t have an equivalent: you can watch a movie while multitasking, sure, but it doesn’t stay on top of your window stack no matter what, which is the genius of iOS 9’s interpretation.

I’m hoping OS X 10.12 will address this issue. In the meantime, though, there’s an app that will give OS X iOS 9-style picture in picture mode. And it’s free!

If you’re environmentally conscious at all, or if you’re just trying to save a few pennies on your electricity bill, you’re probably aware that a lot of gadgets suck up a surprising amount of energy when in standby mode.

Consequently, many people suggest that you should totally unplug these “energy vampires” when they’re not in use … but how seriously should you take that? Should you be totally unplugging your MacBook charger, or your iPad charger, when it’s not in use?

Although the microblogging service pays a lot of attention to its iOS client, even rolling out a new feature called Moments last week, Twitter has traditionally ignored its OS X client. But it’s about to get a much needed update, including a dark mode custom tailored for OS X El Capitan.

Although Apple’s still remaining mum on official sales numbers, Cupertino isn’t laying off the Apple Watch marketing as we approach the holiday season. Apple just released five new short ads highlighting Apple Watch’s ability to take advantage of Siri, Apple Music, Apple Pay, notifications, fitness tracking and more.

If you steal from Apple, watch out. And if you steal a million bucks from Apple while working as an Apple Store employee? Prepare to go to jail.

They may not have done so well in India, but on Samsung’s home turf, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are doing gangbusters business. In South Korea, in fact, iPhone 6s preorders sold out within minutes of becoming available.

One of the reasons Apple says you shouldn’t jailbreak your iPhone is because doing so will impact performance. But is that actually true, or is that just what Apple wants you to believe? This video holds the answers.

Apple gets a lot of kudos for its design chops, but there’s one product everyone thinks Cupertino can improve: iTunes. The bloated Swiss army knife app for managing everything from your music library to the apps on your iPhone has been begging for a rethink for years. Yet for whatever reason, Apple has yet to deliver a true design overhaul of iTunes.

The situation has gotten so bad, iTunes is now being assigned to college students as a design problem. Students at German college Fachochschule Potsdam were assigned the task of splitting iTunes up into 16 different apps. And the results look pretty good!

I’m not sure why iOS doesn’t officially support nested folders, despite the fact that people have been clamoring for them for years.

Needless to say, dropping a folder inside another folder is still a no-no in iOS 9.0.2 … unless you use this easy trick to nest your folders inside each other.

Does your iPhone feel like it’s been running slower since the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus came out? It turns out there’s a good reason for that.

From a gamer’s point of view, if not a developer’s, the ultimate metric of a new device is its TTD, or Time To Doom. Ever since the source code to the classic first-person shooter was released over a decade ago, it has been used as the standard measurement of a new device’s capabilities.

Now, Doom has been ported to the new Apple TV and watchOS 2.

iOS 9 has continued to make Apple Maps better by introducing transit directions to the mix. Unfortunately, they’ve been relatively slow-to-roll out, with transit directions available in 11 cities. But yesterday, Apple quietly updated its site, indicating that transit directions for Boston, Massachusetts and Sydney, Australia are imminent.

For years, Pop Chart Lab’s Insanely Great History of Apple has been one of our go-to Christmas recommendations for the Mac fan in your life. Now those devious bastards have updated it with all of Apple’s latest and greatest products, right before the holiday.

Just a few days after they were offered the opportunity to buy a unit early, at least one developer has already received a new Apple TV dev kit in the mail.

Time’s a crazy thing: it’s different everywhere! So if you’re wondering when iOS 9 will drop tomorrow, well, it’ll probably be different from us depending on where you are.

Thankfully, just by consulting this chart, you can know exactly when you should start tapping the update button according to where you are in the world.

Behold! The iOS 9 Worldwide Release Time Chart!

If you’re worried for some reason that the new Apple TV might not have strong enough video chops with all those apps and games, good news: Plex and VLC, two of the best video apps around, are coming to Apple’s new set-top box.

In appearance, the new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus look almost identical to the handsets that preceded them. But pick them up, and even without turning the handsets on you might notice a difference: Each is about 11 percent heavier than the previous year’s model.

Why’d the iPhone get so chunky? It’s all about 3D Touch.

It’s hard to believe, but there’s one new Apple product that seems to have slipped past media scrutiny during last week’s “Hey Siri” event: a totally new case for the iPad mini.

Take this with a huge grain of salt, but a blurry image coming out of Asia purporting to be from Apple’s own iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus spec sheets suggests that Apple may bump the resolution of the next two handsets. But honestly, it’s pretty unlikely. Here’s why.

Earlier today, we saw a gorgeous concept for what the new Apple TV’s iOS 9-driven interface could look like, courtesy of Andrew Ambrosino.

Now, Martin Hajek – the designer behind the most drool-worthy Apple concepts around – has teamed up with Ambrosino to give us a look at what he imagines the Apple TV hardware itself will look like.

No surprises here: it’s gorgeous. And while it’s probably not what the new Apple TV will actually look like, I’d love to buy this if Apple released it as an Apple TV Pro.

If you’re using an exercise app for your iPhone, you’re probably not getting as good a workout as you’d hope, according to the results of a new study.

We know that the next Apple TV will be a radical, gaming focused overhaul of Apple’s streaming set-top box, but what will it actually look like? Wednesday will tell, but if it looks and feels anything like this iOS 9 overhauled concept by Andrew Ambrosino, we’ll be pretty happy indeed.

We’ve previously heard rumors that Apple’s new Apple TV, which is scheduled to be announced Wednesday, will feature an all-new, motion-sensing remote that will poise the set-top box as a possible console killer.

Now, the New York Times is backing the rumor up, saying the next Apple TV is being designed by Apple specifically to take on the likes of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo for the hearts and minds of living room gamers.

One of the hallmarks of Apple’s tick-tock cycle of iPhone updates is that every other iPhone gets thinner than its predecessors. The iPhone 7, then, should be thinner than the iPhone 6 or iPhone 6s, just as they were thinner than the iPhone 5.

But how crazy thin will the iPhone 7 be? Just as thin as the iPod Touch, says one of the most reputable Apple analysts in the business.

Although Apple’s September 9th event looks like it will super charge the Apple TV into a PlayStation-killing video game console, it’s not the indisputable king-of-the-hill of streaming media boxes right now. Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast… all have their advantages over the Apple TV except for one killer feature: AirPlay Mirroring, which allows the Apple TV to stream anything running on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

Unless you have an Apple TV, you can’t use AirPlay Mirroring… right? Actually, you can, as long you have a Raspberry Pi.